The Russian invaders of Ukraine are the new Nazis, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Korniychuk Yevgen said Monday in Jerusalem at a memorial service for the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre.
In response, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said everyone should stop making comparisons to Nazis and the Holocaust, including Israelis.
It was important to remember the Babyn Yar massacre that took place 84 years ago as Israel grapples with remembering the October 7 massacre during the Israel-Hamas War and as the “new Nazis” are attacking Ukraine, Yevgen said at the Israel National Library.
Afterward, during a panel discussion, Dayan said he was bothered by Yevgen’s comparison of Russian forces to Nazis and decried how commonplace it had become to use imagery of the Holocaust for political purposes.
This extended to Russia’s descriptions of the Ukrainian government as Nazis, and Israelis were guilty of the phenomenon as well, he said.
“The Holocaust is the Holocaust, and the Nazis are the Nazis,” Dayan told The Jerusalem Post. “The only time that it’s legitimate to reference Auschwitz is when talking about Auschwitz.”
Using the Holocaust as a political tool
While awareness and knowledge of the Holocaust has increased over the decades, it has also been used more for political manipulation, he said. Greater understanding of the crimes of the Nazis meant that they and their genocide of Jews had become a symbol of evil that could be wielded as a political tool, he added.
Comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazis had reduced intellectual curiosity about what actually happened, Dayan said. Such comparisons can diminish the magnitude of the World War II genocide, he said.
In the 20th century, Holocaust denial was more of an issue for those attempting to spread awareness of the Holocaust, but it had now become a marginal issue, Dayan said. Today, new problems in understanding had arisen, including trivialization and distortion through false comparisons, he said.
Dayan took issue with those who engage in what he called deflection, with some countries claiming that they had opposed the Holocaust much more than they actually had.
Another issue was Holocaust inversion, he said, in which people blamed Jews for the Holocaust or used its memory as a political cudgel against Israel and the Jewish people.